Andre Duza's Blog

For about 5 years, during, and after college, I worked as a bouncer at a bar in Bowling Green, Ohio called Uptown/Downtown. It was the most popular bar/nightclub in town.

One night, while working, I’m talking to some girl that I’m messing around with when another bouncer walks up to me and says, “Hey. Have you seen the new bartender?”

It was Brenda. She’s wearing an Uptown/Downtown T-shirt and Daisy Dukes-type, cut-off denim shorts.

I look over at her and say, “Yeah. She’s pretty hot.”

The gi...

First and foremost, a big thanks to everyone who contributed to the budget. Your donations are greatly appreciated. Be on the lookout for a nice little ‘Thank you’ package once we’ve got everything wrapped up.

The short is shaping up nicely thanks to the efforts of our top-notch cast and crew and to a great director in my partner Bill Haley. I look forward to our continued collaboration.

What started out as a three-day shoot has become four days once we decided to expand a pivotal scene in...

So, I guess this chapter all came about from a conversation over dinner with Morgan Gendel. Morgan is a screenwriter/television producer who’s written for shows like Law and Order, Nash Bridges, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. He’s kind of an old-timey Hollywood guy who’s still pushing forward in a town that has become unfamiliar to him. And I mean that in the most affectionate way possible.

We became friends after meeting during the MUF/Hollow Eyed Mary fiasco. We’d bounc...

It was 1997. We lived on the second floor of a three story apartment building. The front door of the building was squeezed between a Chinese Restaurant on the left and a Japanese Restaurant on the right. You could walk onto the roof of the Japanese Restaurant and easily gain access to our bedroom via three large bay windows. These windows were like 100 years old and didn’t lock. That’s what you get for $375 a month in 1997. With the exception of the Fortune Teller across the hall (whose custo...

Being an artist myself, I’ve always felt the need to express myself visually as well through prose. Art Upside Your Head is my way of saying thanks to all the artists I’ve had the opportunity to work with so far. First up is my personal favorite of the bunch, Texas-based artist Silverfish aka Amanda Barnett.

What attracted me to Silverfish was that her style reminded me of Stephen Gammell, whose work in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books I loved as a kid. Turns out Gammell was one o...

“If you really wanna find out what makes people tick, just watch porn”

-Howard Stern

So, I was listening to Howard while working out last week when he prefaced some awful-sounding, scat-porn clip with the above quote. It struck a cord that took me back to a time when, after a long day of watching porn at work, I rode home on my bike thinking the same exact thought.

It was around ’05. I had just been laid off from a good job as an Editor/Proofreader at a Pharmaceutical Communications Company....

To put it simply, the Make U Famous debacle took a big, runny shit on my dream. If you’re not familiar with that went down, you can read about it here: Ain’t It Cool News

Ga head. I’ll wait…

All done? Pretty fucked up, right? I had never experienced anything close to the level of conniving, backstabbing, underhanded cowardly behavior that took place during that nightmare, and I grew up in the hood. In retrospect, I should’ve seen it coming. But I kept relying on this thing called trust. Live...